SERIOUS TRAINING 33
The Training Week
In last week’s SERIOUS TRAINING 32 I described two common recovery methods for concluding a mesocycle (about a month of training): scheduled recovery and recovery on demand. But there’s another important place where recovery belongs in your periodization plan—within each microcycle (usually a week of training). Just as there are different ways to recover between multi-week training blocks, there are also options for balancing stress and recovery within each training week.
As with almost everything in training, weekly recovery comes down to balancing hard and easy workouts. Aside from taking an occasional day completely off, performance depends on getting that balance right.
Back in the 1980s, athletes often trained hard far too frequently. We had no real recovery protocols. I remember weeks with as many as five hard workouts while also piling on enormous training volume. No wonder I was constantly tired and frequently injured. We simply didn’t know any better.
The 1990s brought important changes. Periodization was beginning to spread beyond the Eastern Bloc, where it had long been used with great success.
I recall speaking at a coaching clinic in California around 1990 alongside Tudor Bompa, PhD, who is considered by many to be the “Father of Periodization.” I spent that weekend asking him countless questions about how Romanian coaches organized training. I was fascinated. That experience eventually inspired The Cyclist’s Training Bible (Dr. Bompa wrote its foreword), followed by The Triathlete’s Training Bible and, eventually, 17 more books on periodization for endurance athletes.
During the 1990s, many athletes focused much of their training around lactate threshold (LT2). This intensity was thought to produce the greatest return on investment. Heart rate monitors had become widely available, portable lactate analyzers were beginning to appear, and power meters were emerging for cyclists. These tools made it much easier to target threshold training. As a result, athletes often accumulated several moderately hard workouts each week because they felt productive without being as painful—or seemingly as risky—as very high-intensity intervals.
Then, in the early 2000s, endurance training underwent one of its biggest shifts since interval training became popular in the 1930s.
The change wasn’t that coaches suddenly discovered easy training. Elite endurance athletes had always done a great deal of low-intensity work. The revolution was that sport scientists began carefully measuring what the world’s best athletes were actually doing.
Researchers analyzed the training diaries of Olympic cross-country skiers, rowers, runners, cyclists, and biathletes. Regardless of sport, they found remarkably similar patterns:
75–90% of training performed below the first lactate threshold (LT1)
10–25% performed at or above the second lactate threshold (LT2)
Surprisingly little between LT1 and LT2
The in-between “threshold zone” wasn’t absent—it simply occupied far less of the training program among elites than many coaches had assumed.
Perhaps no one did more to popularize these observations than Stephen Seiler, PhD. A Texan working in Norway, Seiler recognized that elite athletes in many endurance sports distributed their training similarly. He introduced the concept of polarized training and popularized the simple “80/20“ description.
One point is often misunderstood. Seiler has repeatedly emphasized that 80/20 is not a rigid prescription. Rather, it’s an observation of how successful endurance athletes typically organize their training over long periods. Depending on the athlete, event, season, and how intensity is measured, the ratio may vary from roughly 75/25 to 90/10.
Just as importantly, Seiler’s original work focused primarily on the number of workouts, not necessarily the number of minutes spent at each intensity. In other words, roughly 80% of training sessions were easy and about 20% were hard.
The early 2000s therefore represented less of a revolution in how elite athletes trained than a revolution in how coaches understood, measured, and described successful training.
Of course, polarized training isn’t the only successful model that came out of that era. Pyramidal training—mostly easy workouts with some threshold training and very little extremely hard work—remains common among world-class marathoners. Around the same time, Vladimir Issurin introduced block periodization to endurance sports, concentrating on developing one or two abilities during relatively short training blocks while maintaining others.
Nor did Seiler invent easy training. Arthur Lydiard promoted high-volume aerobic training in the 1960s, and Scandinavian cross-country ski coaches had relied on large volumes of easy training for decades.
What changed was that exercise physiologists finally documented these successful practices scientifically, explained why they worked, and gave coaches a common vocabulary—terms such as polarized training, intensity distribution, and 80/20.
So what does all of this history mean for your weekly training?
It comes down to organizing your week so that hard workouts are separated by enough easy training to allow complete recovery and maximum adaptation. That’s what ultimately improves fitness. Here’s how I’d suggest doing that.
